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Third Party Publishers Worry About Wii U Sales Figures

NintendoNintendo‘s Wii U has struggled since launch and now third-party game publishers are starting to worry.

No Console for Third Parties

Andy Robertson has a good list of games coming to the Wii U that he says are reasons gamers ought to pick up Nintendo’s new consoles. While most of those games look great, they also underscore a problem: by and large, the majority of games we have to be excited about on the Wii U are first party titles.

Third-party support for the console has dropped off considerably.

A handful of new third party games—Skylanders Swap Force, the new Batman game and Disney Infinity are coming to the Wii U, but not exclusively. Even the upcoming DC Comics Scribblenauts game will come to 3DS and PC alongside its Wii U release.

Ubisoft, one of the Wii U’s biggest initial supporters, has soured on the device after poor sales of the new original IP ZombiU fell well below expectations, leading the company to make the new Rayman Legends a multi-platform release.

“We must find a way to ensure the creativity of those games could have a big enough audience,” Yves Guillemot, Chairman and CEO of Ubisoft, told GamesIndustry International. ”We hope it will take off. At the moment, we’ve said ‘let’s do through Christmas and see where we are from there.’”

In fact, ZombiU wasn’t profitable at all for Ubisoft, and a sequel is out of the question. Which is too bad, since it really was a good game.

EA’s Peter Moore is even more dubious, noting that EA’s own line-up of Wii U games saw poor sales and a troubling lack of online engagement.

“The lack of online engagement that we see on Wii U [is troubling],” Moore told GamesIndustry.biz. “It’s so integral to what we do. They’re so small it’s hardly worth running the servers. It seems like a box that’s out of sync with the future of EA – which is one that gives a real social feel to our games. The Wii U feels like an offline experience right now.”

Even Skylanders publisher Activision says they have “nothing new” to announce for the Wii U.

It’s all eerily reminiscent of the Wii’s number one problem: the lack of third-party support.

That system outsold its competitors but many of those sales were by casual players who didn’t invest nearly as much into the system as consumers of the Xbox 360 and PS3.

I would argue that this had more to do with the gimmicky controllers rather than lack of third-party support, given Nintendo’s strong line-up of first party software for that system.

Can Nintendo Get Its Groove Back?

The Wii U is a fine gaming device, and the touch-screen gamepad is comfortable and works well. The potential for asymmetric play is fantastic and currently under-utilized. Content, and the lack thereof, is the Wii U’s biggest problem, and something that Nintendo has chalked up to the unexpected challenges with producing HD games.

The Wii U also allows used game sales, game lending, and offline play—by and large, it’s a very consumer-friendly device.

But content isn’t the only problem.

The Wii U is not a fast machine. I don’t care that it doesn’t have the power of the PS4 and Xbox One—I don’t think each system needs to have the exact same graphical performance to be successful. No, what I want from a “next-gen” console is instant gratification.

That may sound silly, but it’s true. I want my video game machines to turn on instantly, load games instantly, not keep me waiting on load screens. And the Wii U has terrible load times. What I wanted out of the updated Monster Hunter was a seamless world; instead, we got the same exact type of load times between areas we saw on the Wii. Booting up NetflixNetflix takes longer on the Wii U than on the Xbox 360 or PS3.

This is not instant gratification, and that’s a problem.

The other problem is the gamepad itself. I enjoy it, but it still feels like a peripheral.

It’s a great piece of tech that maybe should have been sold separately, with more of the Wii U’s budget spent on faster components. I also don’t really like the fact that the Wiimotes are the system’s default secondary controllers. I’m a curmudgeon for traditional controllers, and would have liked to see a return to standard gamepads with the Wii U.

The party games—Nintendo Land, Game & Wario, etc—all make great use of the touch-screen, but however fun and cute these games may be, they aren’t necessarily system-sellers (so far) and won’t convince third parties to stick by Nintendo’s side.

After all, developing for a system that is not as high-spec as the other next-gen systems and that requires an entirely different type of controller to use is an expensive prospect made all the more expensive by lagging sales. The problem is a cyclical one. Sales follow content, but content also follows sales.

And with no price-cut in sight for the Wii U, both content and sales may struggle this holiday season, especially with so many games launching in 2014.

I like the Wii U quite a lot actually, and I love Nintendo’s first-party line-up. I’m excited for some of the more edgy titles like the new Monolith game and Bayonetta 2 as well as the return of Donkey Kong Country and Mario Kart.

But I worry that Nintendo’s main selling point—the gamepad—will ultimately be the Wii U’s Achilles heal. I don’t know if the system can make the same sort of turn-around we saw with the 3DS given the strength of the competition. The 3DS was lucky in some ways that the Vita had such a hard time taking off. But the Wii U is competing poorly against current-gen systems and the next-gen systems are on the holiday horizon.

That being said, I don’t see Nintendo quitting the Wii U anytime soon.

The company is nothing if not stubborn, avoiding, for instance, the adoption of HD graphics until 2012. Maybe that stubbornness will pay off; but maybe not with third-party publishers.

Maybe what Nintendo needs to do is quit worrying about luring in third-party publishers altogether. For some games, like Infinity and Skylanders and the LEGO games, the Wii U is going to be a valuable platform given that many families and younger gamers will own one.

Nintendo’s most valuable resource isn’t any given system, it’s their treasure trove of first-party IPs, and if third party publishers walk away from the Wii U, then Nintendo is going to have to focus on getting as much quality content out for its own system as possible. That includes old classics like Mario and Yoshi, but also new games with new characters. New classics, even, that gamers can latch onto as firmly as they have Zelda and Luigi.

Maybe it’s time for Nintendo to dip into its reserves and expand its software operations as quickly as possible, whether that means buying up developers or fleshing out its own teams. If third-party support is waning, Nintendo will need to support its own platform more than ever.

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